applied math – Quanta Magazine

Geometers Engineer New Tools to Wrangle Spacecraft Orbits

Leila Sloman — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 14:15:34 +0000

In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The $5 billion mission is designed to find out if Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, can support life. But because Europa is constantly bombarded by intense radiation created by Jupiter’s magnetic field, the Clipper spacecraft can’t orbit the moon itself. Instead...

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Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement

Lyndie Chiou — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 13:50:38 +0000

In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10% of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the preceding seven years, despite an influx of about 2 million voters. These closures were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly Black areas that tended to vote Democratic.

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The Year in Math

Konstantin Kakaes — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 01:33:58 +0000

Mathematical truths are often born of the conflict between order and disorder. Mathematicians discover patterns, and, to better understand the mysterious forces at play, they look for countervailing impulses that disrupt those patterns. That tension came up repeatedly in our coverage this past year. We covered breakthroughs in graph theory, combinatorics, number theory and geometry — areas where...

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How Math Has Changed the Shape of Gerrymandering

Mike Orcutt — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 14:32:03 +0000

Until recently, gerrymandered districts tended to stick out, identifiable by their contorted tendrils. This is no longer the case. “With modern technology, you can gerrymander pretty effectively without making your shapes very weird,” said Beth Malmskog, a mathematician at Colorado College. This makes it that much harder to figure out whether a map has been unfairly manipulated.

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New Proof Finds the ‘Ultimate Instability’ in a Solar System Model

Jordana Cepelewicz — Tue, 16 May 2023 14:05:08 +0000

In 2009, a pair of astronomers at the Paris Observatory announced a startling discovery. After building a detailed computational model of our solar system, they ran thousands of numerical simulations, projecting the motions of the planets billions of years into the future. In most of those simulations — which varied Mercury’s starting point over a range of just under 1 meter — everything proceeded...

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